How to get your kids off facebook

“Get off Facebook NOW!” I yelled. Again. As my voice reverberated around the house on its way to my son’s ears this week, I paused to consider how many more times I would shout these words between now and when he finishes school in six years.

Around then, conveniently, my next child will be old enough for Facebook and then the next one soon after that. It would seem I have some tough years ahead and I fear for my vocal cords. Perhaps I need to re-think my approach.

Clearly, I need to upgrade my parenting software to learn how to deal with kids and their Facebook fixation.  What To Expect When You’re Expecting didn’t have a chapter on social media and this is a travesty because I can’t be the only parent to find herself shouting, eye-rolling, foot-stamping, threatening and generally feeling exasperated about Facebook. Can I?

Possibly, our parents felt the same way when we spent too long on the phone but that battle was far more straightforward. With the phone, it was clear if we were talking to our friends or not and you could only speak to one at a time. Managing Internet use is harder. There are so many legitimate reasons to be online that it’s virtually impossible to monitor exactly what someone is doing when they’re sitting in front of a screen. Or how long they’re there after you go to bed.

However, it’s not just the time-suck aspect of social media that’s doing parents’ heads in. It’s the whole idea of what Facebook represents. Namely, why does everything have to be so PUBLIC? Why this insatiable need to communicate CONSTANTLY about EVERYTHING? And also? GET OFF FACEBOOK AND GO CLIMB A BLOODY TREE WILL YOU?

Being a columnist, blogger and Twitter user, I have some insight into the phenomenon of broadcasting parts of your life to the world. And I also spend hours in front of my computer for work. Yet still I regularly lose the plot with my son about Facebook so for normal parents, it must be worse.

A friend’s son recently broke up with his girlfriend. They’d been together for five months but sadly, he just wasn’t that into her anymore. He told her this gently, in person one afternoon after school at approximately 4:46pm and by 5:05pm, the news was all over the net (not from him). By the time my friend’s son arrived home at 5:53pm, his Facebook wall was heaving under the weight of abusive messages from his ex girlfriend’s friends.

“Whatever happened to privacy, to hurting quietly, to not telling anyone your business?” wondered my friend, genuinely baffled by the whole thing, especially the part where her son wasn’t fazed by it. Welcome to Facebook, the fishbowl of life. It’s not unlike our lives at the same age, just faster and more intense. Much much more.

When we were 14 it would have taken days not minutes for news of a breakup to slowly snake its way along the grapevine. Now the grapevine is wireless. And it streams instantly into your house via the computer or into your child’s pocket via their phone. There’s no such thing as laying low for a teenager anymore. The moment you go online after doing or experiencing something mildly interesting, the world is in your face expressing their opinion about it. So as a parent, how do you deal?

People, these are drastic times. And sometimes? They call for drastic measures.

I have a friend who is a genius. I never knew this until he told me of his novel solution for Kids Who Spend Too Much Time Online. Also known as “teenagers”.

A couple of years ago, he was being driven berserk by his 13 year old son’s obsession with computer games and even though he waged a valiant battle and shouted a lot, he just didn’t have the strength to fight the fight every single time. Wave your hands in the air if that sounds familiar. I’m waving. One day, he found himself venting about it to his electrician who hatched a cunning plan.

“After some discussion, he came up with a system like a TV remote control, which I could flick from anywhere in the house and it would shut down the internet,” he explained to me. “I could, thus, be sitting talking with Ed, while he was distracted by the net, and hit the button. He would look up, and say “Dad, the net’s gone down!” and I would commiserate and go to bed, confident in the knowledge that he was not on Facebook, net games, porn etc, but instead was getting some sleep. Or reading a book.”

According to my friend, this brilliant strategy got the family through a crucial 18 months. By the time his son began to suspect, he was mature enough to cope and had discovered girls anyway. “I still use it to zap the younger kids” my friend confided as I gave him a standing ovation. Yes, I know you want the number of the electrician. Get in line.